The Clocktower Gallery presents Jene Highstein: Early Works, an exhibition of sculpture and drawing by Jene Highstein (1942 – 2013). One of the first artists to present work at the Clocktower Gallery, in 1973, Highstein passed away April 27, 2013, at age 70, in Salem, NY.Read more...

"It's such a pleasure when amid the long arch of an artist's development another

body of work -- one for which the artist is less known-- is revealed. Think Dan Flavin's watercolors, John McCracken's mandalas, even Chamberlain's foam rubber or twisted foils. Such works provide insights that broaden our experience of the artist, sometimes exponentially. Oh, those mystic truths.

For Jene Highstein, an artist renown for sculptural works that are resolutely physical -- often massive in scale -- his current exhibition of The Cape Breton Drawings, on view atArtHelix in Bushwick, is a revelation."

Form determines content in Jene Highstein's soaring Flora Tower, a looming stack of hand-hammered stainless steel segments that are gently imposing, ceremonial, and iconic. Highstein has said of his work:

"Stone age tools, ceremonial objects, and idols fascinate me and are among the source of materials for my work. The content of my work is not so much nature abstracted, but a form which is evolved in relation to nature and which carries with it natural associations."from The Mattress Factory

For some four decades now, Highstein's body of work has straddled the tenets of modernism and minimalism, yet it remains independent of both. Materiality, process and gesture -- ceremony and ritual -- the evolution of Highstein's art defies categorization.